[Update] ZeeRate Is A New WhatsApp Chatbot That Helps You Check Black Market Exchange Rates

With Zimbabwe seemingly in a transition to dollarize, a growing number of companies are now demanding payments in US dollars. Those who still accept bond notes will still be quoting their prices in US dollars but you can make a payment in bond notes or RTGS/mobile money (EcoCash predominantly) using the current exchange rate of USD: bond notes or RTGS/Ecocash.

It can be a whole lot of work to be always going on the internet or calling people to check or ask the prevailing rate before you decide to make a payment. ZeeRate is a chatbot that makes your life easier to check rates anytime in the comfort of your WhatsApp. Yes, ZeeRate is WhatsApp chatbot. It’s a part of a growing list of WhatsApp chatbots that Zimbabwe developers are developing.

How Zeerate works

ZeeRate works kinda differently to other chatbots that have recently been introduced in Zimbabwe. With other chatbots, you only have to add the chatbot’s number and text a certain chant like ‘Hi’ and then you start to interact with the chatbot.

I don’t know if you have heard about Duta WhatsApp chatbot before, but that’s pretty much how the ZeeRate WhatsApp chatbot works like. With the ZeeRate WhatsApp chatbot, you save the chatbot’s number AND THEN create a group or add the number to a group (the difference). You then send a text like Hi to start to interact with the chatbot. You see the difference is the that with the ZeeRate WhatsApp chatbot is that you have to create a group, rather than just start to interact (in the chat, not the group) with the chatbot after you save its number?

I’m not sure why Zeerate chose that tedious way for people to communicate with its chatbot. My uneducated (and stupid) guess is that maybe they want to have more people communicate with their chatbot system. But to what benefit?

Chatbots as a concept is going to evolve and become meaningful. They will create more opportunities for new companies to explode from nothing into prominence. They will create many new business strategy opportunities. In my opinion, they will play a large role in online business but not every role.
Engati is a chatbot platform that allows you to build, manage, integrate, train, analyse and publish your personalized bot in a matter of minutes. It presently supports eight major messaging platforms including messenger, kik, telegram, line, viber, skype, slack and webchat with a focus on customer engagement, conversational commerce, and customer service and fulfillments.

Isn’t this overkill for a bot, and also for an article. Soon enough there’ll be an article on a bot to find the current time.

Back to the bot, developers should make themselves more useful creating true innovation. I don’t think there’s any innovation here. From a security perspective, this bot could easily be collecting phone numbers of individuals interested in the black market, for future unknown purposes. I wouldn’t recommend using it considering that.

Thanks for writing about chatbots. Definitely bots have the exciting future when it comes to customer engagement, transactional and conversations commerce domain. Given the bot technology is still evolving and we do need to focus on better user experience, business integration… We at Engati have started this evolutionary journey. Do visit us and provide us with your valuable feedback at http://www.engati.com/#bl as we strive for more mainstream acceptance of this technology of the future. Create your bot – app.engati.com/getstarted